


Everything, After

by Destina



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-16
Updated: 2008-10-16
Packaged: 2018-02-23 11:30:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2545949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Destina/pseuds/Destina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything is different, after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything, After

**Author's Note:**

  * For [laurificus (Laura)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laura/gifts).



> Originally posted to LJ in 2008. This is post-hell-rescue comfortfic. Possibly very schmoopy. So if you're looking for action or broken!Dean, this isn't the story for you. For laurificus, because I promised I would. And thanks to Killa for bringing back my mojo.

Everything's different, after. 

The room is forty dollars a night, worth maybe ten; it's rank with mildew and stale cigarette smoke, and Sam doesn't notice anymore. He sits on edge of his bed, aching arm cradled against his blood-sticky shirt. Every muscle in his body is quivering, but he can't rest. Not yet. 

There's salt across the threshold, talismans and sigils carved into the walls; Sam tore away the plaster when he drove the knife in, no time to be neat. He sits with his back to the window, both feet on the floor. His body is coiled tight as he waits for trouble, ten different weapons within reach, and he watches Dean. 

Dean's rolled up in blankets on the bed opposite Sam, top of his head and one arm emerging from the roll as signs he's really there. He's been staring at Sam for hours as if there's nothing else in the world worthy of his attention. His gaze travels the same path over and over: top of Sam's head, down to his eyes, across the nose, lips, chin, back to the eyes, and up again. Every so often, his eyes fill with tears; eventually they spill over, unnoticed, to leave wet grey patches on the pillow. 

Sam's heart is exploding inside his chest, bursting with joy he won't acknowledge. Can't. Not yet. Not until he's sure. He meets Dean's eyes, lets him look, looks back; the job is almost done, now. 

Toward morning, soft light penetrates the heavy drapes at the top, bleeding into the room. Sam sighs, the first time he's taken a deep breath in days, and Dean's breath hitches, too. Sam's body was waiting for a signal, and it's taken the sunrise as the trigger. Sam slides off the bed and to the floor as if his strings have been cut. He hits the carpet with a wince, his body now a mass of aches and small wounds he refused to acknowledge until that moment. 

Within moments, he's asleep. 

What wakes him is Dean's voice, rough, edged with anxiety. "Sammy." 

Sam's eyes fly open. He expects it to be another dream, something his mind has conjured up to ease his sadness, but the voice is real, and it fills the room. And then Sam remembers: _I saved Dean from hell yesterday._

His head jerks up and Dean is still there, still real, still watching Sam's face, but now with a trace of fear in his eyes. "No, it's okay," Sam says, responding to it immediately. He tries to push up off the ground, but he's so stiff. There's no part of him that doesn't hurt. 

"Sammy," Dean says again. His voice breaks in the middle of the word. Sam realizes Dean's reaching out to him, one hand slowly falling in midair because Dean doesn't have the strength to hold it up. He's somehow made it to the edge of the bed, as close as he could get to Sam without falling off himself. Another minute and he might have tried it. 

"I'm okay," Sam says, and this time he answered the right question, because Dean drops his hand like a heavy anvil. He's breathing hard, worn out, but the anxious light is still in his eyes. 

This time Sam manages to get off the ground, one painful inch at a time. He staggers backwards; his knees catch on the bed and he sits down on it abruptly with a shout of pain. "Fuck," he says, kicking the dust ruffle with the heel of his boot. 

When he looks up at Dean again, the smallest smirk is curling the corner of his brother's mouth, and it's all Sam can do not to cry with relief when he sees it. 

"Be right back," he says, and when Dean's eyes darken, he adds, "I promise." This time when he stands up, he's wobbly but mostly stable. He reaches over, touches Dean's hair just because he can; Dean makes a small noise that isn't quite Sam's name, and Sam has to bite down hard on his lip not to cry. He's had enough of fucking crying. 

He showers fast, swallows more Advil than should be strictly healthy on a two-days-empty stomach, and pulls on a clean T-shirt. His shoulder's not dislocated, not sprained, just bruised; it's going to hurt for a while, but it'll heal. 

Dean's rolled over by the time Sam steps out of the bathroom, as if he couldn't bear to be facing away from where Sam was. Sam grins at him now, lets everything show on his face. Then he climbs on Dean's bed and sprawls out beside him, close but not touching. He remembers countless nights as a child, too terrified to sleep until Dean was nearby. Dean, Dean. Always Dean. There was never anything else he loved as much, never anything he wanted so desperately. 

Nothing has changed between those days, and this moment. Nothing, and everything. 

They look at each other, smiling every so often, until Dean falls asleep. Once he does, Sam scoots closer, so close he can feel Dean's hair tickling his cheek. He falls asleep that way himself, Dean breathing on his neck, more proof that it's not some dream Sam's invented to torture himself. 

**

In two weeks, they're back on the road -- traveling west, mostly, and the weather shifts between seasons, one two-lane highway at a time. Dean is still weak, but mostly himself; Sam isn't dressing him anymore, not bandaging him or standing anxiously outside the bathroom while Dean shaves and showers and curses a blue streak. Dean's wounds are healed on the outside; he says he doesn't remember much from his time down below, and Sam chooses to believe it, because it's easier. Dean's gaze grows far away sometimes, and Sam doesn't press him, doesn't ask him questions about things Dean is trying to forget. 

Sam remembers what it was like when Dean was gone, so far away he could only see Dean if he closed his eyes and conjured him in memory. Usually around the time Sam's thinking of those awful days, Dean will turn his head and look at Sam, a simple smile on his face, soft and happy and enough to make Sam grin back with pure pleasure. This is his brother; this is his world, and he'll be goddamned if he's ever letting Dean out of his sight again. 

They don't talk as much anymore. The companionable silence extends between them even when Dean has just stopped singing along to some godawful mullet rock song, or after he's flirted with a waitress in Podunk Dinerville, or even after he and Sam have talked over what cases they're going to take, and in what order. 

In the silences, Dean watches him with a direct, open kind of stare that at first, Sam didn't know how to take. He's used to ducking away from Dean's caretaking scrutiny, hiding his skinned knees and cuts and bruises and stowing all his pain away for later self-examination where no one else can see how much it hurts. It's the price of being a Winchester. Of being Dean's brother. But Dean seems to see past that now; he doesn't even seem to be looking at Sam's skin, but underneath it, down past blood and bone, like he's measuring each of Sam's heartbeats. 

Sam can't really explain it, but he doesn't mind it anymore, doesn't mind being the subject of the kind of attention that used to take away all the air in the room. 

Now, he just looks back, until Dean smiles and goes back to what he's doing, cleaning guns or watching TV or reading the paper. Sometimes he looks for a long time even when Dean is done, because losing Dean has made him understand: some things are as necessary as air, as gravity, and Dean is that, for him. 

He didn't take it well, when he first realized it. But that was a million miles and a couple of deaths ago, and Sam has come to terms with what it takes to keep breathing, to keep standing on solid ground. 

**

Up north, somewhere in the middle of a nowhere road surrounded by snowy fields, Dean climbs into a snowbank and sits there for a while. Sam dives into the fluffy pile beside him and they wallow contentedly in silence as the snow melts beneath them and seeps into their jeans, the cold making Sam's ass numb. Suddenly Dean scoops up a handful of snow and smashes it into Sam's face, taking his breath away. He falls over backward, kicking his legs in the air for balance. When he rights himself, he lifts a hefty fistful of cold wet snow for payback, but he stops when he realizes Dean is laughing. Not a chuckle or a self-satisfied laugh, but a deep, rich, happy laugh, eyes squinted shut and all his teeth showing. 

Sam drops the snow and dries his wet hand on his jacket, grinning hard. Dean looks at him, eyes bright, and catches him right in the face with a much harder snowball. And now Sam starts to laugh, and it's on; they pelt each other with snow and slush and ice and anything else within reach until they've both laughed themselves weak and are sprawled gasping in the snow, too exhausted to keep fighting. 

"Your snowballs are for shit, Sammy," Dean tells him, and considering that Dean taught him how to make them, that sets Sam off again, his whole body alight with happiness. 

That night Sam stands in the parking lot and watches the moon arc over the crisp hard snow, silver through the icicles, the world silent and white, while Dean tosses and turns twenty feet away behind a closed door. Different from winters remembers as a kid, the blur of snowbanks flying by as he slumped in the backseat, wondering where they'd end up, where Dad was going to stop, and whether their clothes would be too warm or not warm enough when they finally arrived. 

When he goes inside, he stands beside the bed for some time, watching Dean sleep. He still sleeps the same as Sam remembers, an arm tucked beneath the pillow and face mashed into it, drooling a little onto the cheap rough pillowcase. The urge to pull Dean close to him is so strong that a thrill of fear ripples through Sam, and his breath catches in his throat. He's going to have to get past this, get over it; Dean is here, alive. Real. Whole. It's over. The fight goes on, and now they go on, together.

He cranks the shower to super-hot and stands under it forever, but by the time it's over he's still not warm. He dries off, stares at himself in the mirror, and what he sees is someone who did what he had to do. Someone who knows now what family means. 

Sam pulls on a T-shirt and shorts and burrows into the blankets with Dean, pressing his cold face between Dean's shoulderblades. Dean makes a loud noise of complaint, but he turns over and throws an arm over Sam, and Sam shoves his face in the warm space between Dean's cheek and his neck. Dean tilts his head, presses his lips against Sam's temple; Sam shivers and pulls Dean closer, ignoring Dean's sleepy noise of protest as he rearranges them into a pile of jumbled arms and legs.

They breathe together for a while, slipping toward sleep, until Sam feels warm and safe again. 

**

They drive; they hunt; they live their lives, the way they always have. 

Somewhere in northern California, Dean stands at the curb beside a 7-11 in a wee agro town and inhales a cup of morning coffee, while Sam sorts out their cash and credit cards on the hood. Burton Barton has about twenty days worth of grace period. Peter Parker is expired. There are two cards in the drop in New York City, and a fistful of cash - the wadded bits fished out of Dean's pockets, the neatly folded ones, from Sam's wallet. 

"We doing okay, Sammy?" Dean asks, crumpling the cup. 

"Yeah," Sam says. He smoothes the crinkly bills, places them on top of his calmly ordered bills, and shuffles them a bit, counting. "We've got about seventy in cash, and I think another month on one of the cards, so we'll have-"

"All right, then," Dean says. He crumples his cup up, tosses it in the gutter, and shoots Sam an expectant smile, eyebrows raised. Then he pulls open the passenger side door and climbs in. 

Sam blinks. He glances down at the money in his hand, the visible evidence of the things he's taking care of, now, the things only Dean ever used to do. 

"Get a move on!" Dean shouts. He reaches a hand out and slaps the top of the roof to punctuate his demand. 

With an amused sigh, Sam stuffs the cash into his top jacket pocket and gets in the car. 

In Redding, Dean steals Sam's deodorant and writes "Sam Winchester is powder fresh" on the mirror in five-inch-high letters. When Sam bitches, he uses Sam's last pair of clean underwear to wipe it off. 

In Butte, Dean steals Sam's fries - only the ones that already have ketchup on them - and ritualistically takes a bite of each one before flinging the remnants at Sam. One sticks to Sam's left eyebrow; one of them, Sam licks and throws back at Dean, then howls with laughter when it lands perfectly on the tip of his nose, teetering there. Dean peels it off and eats it, then licks his fingers while moaning so loud, the waitress turns a shade of red not previously known in nature. Sam rolls his eyes and eats what's left of his burger while grinning around it. 

In Reno, Dean takes a washcloth and makes a little ghost with wide eyes, then fastens a noose made of Sam's best tie around its neck and hangs it from the curtain rod. It wears a post-it which reads "Just say no to emo" in Dean-scrawl. Sam takes the poor thing down and carefully squirrels it away in his duffel. 

"Sam," Dean says, sly, while he's sharpening one of Sam's knives. "Did you grow girl parts while I was gone? Always wanted a doll to make your life complete?"

"Fuck off," Sam says, fluffing the ghost's head gently before he lays his dirty t-shirts on top of it. 

Somewhere outside of Lubbock, Dean spends a few quality hours under the Impala's hood just so he can bitch at Sam for not wiping down the engine block. Sam leaves him in the dusty Texas sunshine for a while and reads a battered copy of The Stand someone left in the bedside table; pages 45 and 189 are missing, and there are suspicious stains rising up in a half-moon at the bottom of most pages. Dean storms in smelling of freshly cut grass and motor oil, and Sam is sharply aware of him, the curve of his shoulder as he shrugs off his filthy shirt, the way he stands with his feet apart, as if braced for a fight any moment. 

Dean stills, his head bowed, as if he can feel Sam's eyes on him, before he steps into the bathroom and closes the door. Sam falls asleep while Dean's showering; his dreams are full of still lakes, the entire world mirrored in their unbroken surfaces. 

The next day, Dean drives, on and on and on across the wide Texas plains, and Sam watches him: long fingers drumming a pattern on the wheel; gentle turn of his lips when he smiles out the window at a girl in a yellow convertible; the flash of gold-green in his eyes every time he turns to look at Sam sideways, always with a little smile, one Sam can't help but return. 

That night, Sam can feel a change in the air. It's the same as it always is: showers, fast food, some crap TV on a set that can barely form a picture. Sam burrows down into his bed, ready for sleep, but there's a tightness in his chest he can't account for. 

When Dean pulls aside the covers and slides into bed with him, the tightness eases, and Sam lets out a long slow breath. Dean fits himself against Sam, just so, every angle and curve, every callused place, every scar and wound and gaping Dean-shaped hole, as if he knows each hurt and how to heal it. Sam closes his eyes; it's too much. 

Dean's fingers trace the lines of Sam's face, so gently. He brushes his thumbs across Sam's closed eyes, down across his cheeks, his parted lips. "You're what kept me sane," Dean says, low and hoarse. "This, Sammy. Your face. I pictured your face." He leans his forehead against Sam's, his words a whisper against Sam's skin. "This is all there is, for me. If you weren't real, I'd have to make you up to keep me whole." 

Just when Sam thinks he might be able to breathe, Dean's lips touch his, and steal his breath over and over again. 

It's inevitable now that he'll strip Dean bare, that he'll put his hands on Dean like he has the right. That Dean will answer touch for possessive touch, answer Sam's unspoken needs; he'll set his teeth at Sam's neck to make his point. They will know each other this one remaining way, barriers falling as they press and gasp and cry out, twining down deeper into each other until Dean is all Sam can see, the only thing, everything. 

**

In the morning, Dean leans against the Impala and closes his eyes, tips his head back into the soft pale sun, the sweet faint scents of flowers on the air. Sam moves around the car to stand beside him. There's a whole book of words unsaid in the way he shifts closer to Dean, but he's learned the words aren't what's important. 

"You ready?" Dean asks. 

Sam nods and meets his eyes. It's a long time before either of them want to look away. 

They load up the last of their belongings, but Sam goes back twice for things he left in the room. It's not like him to be scatterbrained, but he's lacking in focus today. At least, by a certain definition of focus. 

He climbs in the passenger seat and nods to Dean, finally ready to go. 

Dean's hand closes around the back of his neck; his fingers rub gently there, up into Sam's hair, down again to the nape of his neck. "Got everything you need, Sammy?" he asks softly. 

Sam's been done with tears for a while now, but his voice breaks anyway. "Everything," he answers, bowing his head beneath the steady weight of Dean's hand. 

Dean's touch soothes the last of the grief away.


End file.
